Genealogists love to copy old documents, records, wills, deeds, and even old photographs.

Genealogists love to copy old documents, census records, wills, deeds, and even old photographs. We used to make photocopies and save those in various filing systems. The 21st century solution is to make digital copies, either with a scanner or, even more common, with a cell phone camera.​Making digital copies is quick, easy, and also is easier to save for posterity. Digital images are also easier to insert into various reports and genealogy programs that you may use. In short, digital images provide convenience and security. Even better, for most of us, the cell phone camera is with us wherever we go.

A few years ago, the low-resolution digital cameras built into the cell phones of those days provided marginal results when snapping photographs of old documents or pictures. Luckily, the change in technology has now solved that problem. Today’s cell phones typically include cameras of 8-megapixels or higher resolution, producing very good images of old documents, pages from books, or even good quality copies of photographs. These cameras are excellent substitutes for scanners.

Sarah Mitroff has written The Best Scanning Apps for Android and iPhone, and it is available in the C|Net web site. It doesn’t mention the word “genealogy” anywhere in the article but I suggest it should be required reading for all genealogists who own camera-equipped cell phones. Best of all, Sarah mentions my two favorite cell phone scanner apps.

The article mentioned above covers two free scanning apps that could be helpful in genealogy work. The editors of this blog share this article for information only. We have not personally used either of these apps. Our goal is to inform you of new teck options.

You can read the article about these mobile apps written by Sarah Mitroff , The Best Scanning Apps for Android and iPhone, athttp://goo.gl/hzFYbg.